Read an Excerpt

Pashtun

A Military Thriller

Skyhorse Publishing

So simple. Just breathe. Inhale. Exhale. The migraine came from sucking, like someone just took me off the ventilator. They said I'd get used to it. Swallow the pills. Even Viagra helped, if you could get it. And I was sick of looking at brown rocks and mountains. And Pashtuns. But what I really wanted was to breathe air thick enough to hold more than just a hint of oxygen. Where a match stays lit. Maybe the artillery in my temples would go away. And I wouldn't hate the dirt garden of Afghanistan like I did.

It hadn't been my plan to come over to this desolation to hate. Looking at my reflection in the shallows of a clear Afghan mountain lake, I could still see the face of a smalltown Kansas boy. Not a killer. But the lines on my forehead and around my eyes were increasing. The high altitude made me hallucinate.

Six months and they had sent me even deeper into Tora Bora. More of the hadjis needed killing. It was my job. A Jayhawk dispatched to the Company for one purpose — and only because I knew the difference between ddeemokraasi and democracy. Sometimes, I cursed my Zhebe, tongue, for its unwanted skill in wrapping itself around a language of too many vowels. But, all the CIA training couldn't teach me to get over the smell. I'd learned that, while on an op, I could smear Vicks Vaporub in my nose, just like the cops before they fish out an overripe corpse from the dumpster. Water around these parts wasn't wasted on bathing, and my victims usually voided themselves in the death rattle.

I was just kidding myself. It wasn't the smell. Or the air so thin we could be on a lunar desert. It was the eyes. Those big, black eyes that followed me like I was the anti-Muhammad every time I came near a Pashtu. Haunting, beautiful eyes that make the cover of National Geographic. When I close my own, other eyes are imprinted on my lids. The eyes of the dead.

None of the gung-ho stuff scared me. I wasn't any kind of macho, mindless patriotic machine. It's not that. Friends, family, and the support system of a small Kansas community groomed me in the ethic of the Plains. I've learned to compartmentalize the terror. What kept sleep away was doubt. The fear and knowledge that those eyes were truly innocent, not the bearded mujahedeen madmen described by every drill sergeant and CIA instructor. And I had been ordered over and over to send them on their journey to meet Allah on the word of a desk jockey sifting through a spreadsheet. The intel around there was infamously wrong. And the attitude was a big yawn. One fewer suicide bomber in the making. I could have been sent out on the word of a Pashtu who felt his daughter had been dishonored by the neighbor's glance.

In the field, I had been accused of being reckless. It's a love-hate thing. If my actions raised the body count and no one but a local was greased, I'd get "atta-boys." Of course, nothing went in my file back in Langley unless a friendly became collateral damage. That event might have even brought the ire of the New York Times. The reckless part of me grew. The new me was a personality who had seen enough and understood retribution was approaching. And it would be an eternal bitch.

Fate. It was near, and I was afraid of the debt, not the doing. Not scared of looking up to the cliffs when AK rounds chipped the rocks beside my head. Nor the sound of an RPG shooshing by. Or the smoking hulk of an APC on the side of a mountain road, medics rushing in to pull out bodies before skin peeled off like the outside of a burnt marshmallow. No, it was the fucking mines.

Dead was better than a legless plane ride home to weeping relatives. I hoped my karma wasn't that bad. Mahoney was always on the winning side when we played a lazy afternoon game of touch football back at the base. He could out-jump every other spook in the barracks. You just had to throw the ball high enough. Now the only thing he'll be leaping for is his disability check from a wheelchair. I want to keep my legs.

Even the smiling little village girls with shawls over their heads, begging for chocolate, couldn't get me to return their grins. The spectacular purple flowers that sprung out of the rocks in the most unlikely places only made me wonder what was fertilizing their growth in this dry landscape. Sure, I could see some of the highest mountains in the world out the window of the chopper. But then, I looked down. Everywhere, brown ugly rocks. The Discovery Channel might show pictures that made this wasteland seem spectacular. Colorful tribesmen with toothless smiles. Green valleys with gentle steams irrigating lush farms. You know, that rugged, wild look. But the photographer got to go home. He didn't live to wake up in the morning to a diet of boulders and blood. He got escorted around with a squad of jarheads who didn't take him into areas that hadn't been swept. Maybe, if the reporter got lucky, some insane Pashtu would take a shot at the convoy, giving him lots to talk about over his glass of Chablis back at the Kabul Hilton. Exotic. Primitive.Seren e.Raw beauty. All words and pictures to fantasize about from the couch. Me, it's life. And it sure ain't beautiful.

Home to me was this tent. The people I worked for weren't really military. They came from a long line of killers made notorious in Vietnam. Wild Bill Donovan was our daddy. His spawn, the Phoenix Program. The skills I was taught are just a refinement of the methods my ancestors learned when they snuck up on Victor Charley asleep in his hootch and put a silenced bullet in his brain. Now, it's Harry or Helen Hadji. Same story. Same old men in their Brooks Brothers suits writing the death warrants. Same Generals with their spit-shine aides wiping their asses and ordering me into Khewa to grease a suspected alQaeda sympathizer. There were no courts here. Suspect was enough to get you dead.

The shrinks might say people don't change, even though, if there is no hope, there's no reason for anyone to see fuckin' therapist. I didn't used to swear. Wouldn't think of calling anyone a dune coon or a dung shit. I used to get a time-out and fined twenty-five cents from my allowance if I used fuck. So, it was better to say damn. It only cost a nickel. My vocabulary increased every day. Before, I never knew that horse cock was Spam. Or that a nutsack was a 100-round ammo holder on an M249 Automatic Weapon.

We went to church, too, like most everyone else in Millard, Kansas. None of my friends were terrorists. Sure, we dropped rotten pumpkins on Mrs. Devlin's porch and turned her underwear inside out on the clothesline. But it was harmless. We never called her a fuckin' skank raghead bitch. Not even Timmy Russet, the real town outlaw and my best friend. Now, Timmy's finishing up an accelerated doctoral program in particle physics at Michigan State. But he used to throw M1 fire crackers with extended fuses. He built them from wound paper and glue. We tossed the homemade fireworks at the cop cars parked in front of Swindley's Donuts. Timmy got busted and grounded for a week. No gangs. No crack. No AIDS. Now, I'm in the toughest gang of all. The CIA. Headquartered in the meanest place on Earth outside Baghdad. Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

Nothing much of note after leaving the corn fields of Millard. Four years of study at Kansas State. Visiting parents lots of weekends. A girlfriend off to New York City to find her voice in the publishing world. The usual tailgate parties on Fall Saturdays. Middle American college fun with classes the only distraction. Easy. Aimless. No one died. Then 9/11. In the dorm, I watched the smoke billow from the World Trade Center, and I was angry. Not just at the horror. At myself. I was contributing nothing but a few more dollars to the Coors piggy bank.

For a young man who'd never been west of Denver or east of Louisville, a magic wand had been passed over my tongue. Languages slid off as easy as the fifth tequila shooter went down. If I heard a group of foreign students chatting outside the library, I could pick up the words, and a screen in my brain gave them life. It wasn't as if I translated verbatim, but the cadences, clicks, rolls, and grunts weren't alien. And, if I chose, I could get a book, a tape, or go on the web and join the group the next day, at least able to communicate. Luis, the Hispanic who mowed our neighbor's lawn at home, couldn't call Mrs. LaPlante a vaca gorda puta because I knew he meant she was a fat cow whore. And she didn't weigh an ounce more than two-hundred. When I enlisted and after basic and more advanced training, I was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. Master Sergeant Gomez had noticed it wasn't just Spanish that slid off my tongue. That's where the Company found me. My career as a patriotic semi-Pashto-speaking killer was launched.

Last night, an MH-6 Little Bird helicopter dropped us just south of Shahi Kowt. Intel said a mud hut outside the town was a meeting place for al-Qaeda operatives. But there was no reason to believe the sources were more right this time than any of the other clusterfucks.

Moonbeams danced off the peaks of twenty thousand foot mountains. In the valley below, an occasional muted orange came from a kerosene lamp inside a hut. From miles away, a few passing cars or jeeps bounced on the hardscrabble trails, the glow from their headlights jumping wildly with each pothole or rock. Sheep grazed lazily, searching for anything that resembled food, their silhouettes dark against the slopes. We were running naked, the lights off and the sound suppressors on, the Little Bird painted black and unmarked. I followed the twisting lines of a river, fed by snowmelt in the Hindukush, and wondered if the next twenty-four hours would keep me awake like the last three missions. Or find me fertilizing one of a trillion rocks.

Not even waiting for us to touch down, the Little Bird pulled away. Thorsten and I jumped to the pebbled ground and quickly dashed for the nearest cover. We still had to hump a few klicks east and wouldn't be considered friendlies in this neighborhood, where every man carried a rifle and had an arsenal stashed in the well. The ATN Cougar 2I Night Vision Goggles strapped around our heads gave a clear view for 150 yards. It was easy to pick out one boulder from the next and, after a while, the moon gave us enough light to put away the goggles. Sweat ran down our faces as though we were in a rainstorm in a land where anything over twelve inches in a year is a monsoon.

The CIA had made sure we were outfitted in the best technology corporate America could supply for efficient stealth killing. When we arrived at our hidey hole, we could watch for movement in the dark through the ATN Thermal Eye 225Ds in our Blackhawk X-1 Backpacks with the silent zipper pulls in case anyone was near enough to hear us reach for a HOOAH! Chocolate Crisp Energy Bar or slurp from our HydraStorm Hydration System tubes. If we needed to call in a Drone and spread the shit of a tribe of Pashtuns around on the gravel, we could guide the missiles with an L-3 TruTrak GPS so accurate it would trim the beard of the targeted enemy before it slammed into the ground. The black earpiece and the mike in front of our mouths let us stay in communication with each other and the minders back at the ops base on the FS 5000 Spy Radio. But all these gadgets were nothing compared to the arsenal on our backs, stuffed in the pockets of our night camo fatigues, or in our hands.

We could blow up a suburb of Kabul if it all detonated at once. My favorite, the old trusty standby, was the .22 Hush Puppy silenced pistol, made notorious in Vietnam by my mentors from Phoenix. I wasn't going to shoot any dogs. Success in these kinds of ops really meant getting in quietly and out even more quietly. If we had to use the armory on our backs, we were in a world of shit. That was the point of not just phoning in an air strike and blasting the targets further into the Stone Age. We needed intel. Or so I was told. And to leave a few bodies as a reminder if we found hostiles.

* * *

The old woman stood by the stone well, looking down. She tried to turn the bucket lift, but it was stuck on the dog. I only knew she was old because the Steiner 8 x 30 binoculars brought her stoop and the wrinkles into focus from nearly three hundred yards. Up close, she could have been fifteen. Now, I thought "old" seemed right, even though she might not have been a year past my twenty-five. Afghanistan aged women harshly. And men. If they lived.

Two small boys kicked a crushed can and chased each other in the dusty courtyard, screaming "barj ra-histah," catch me, in the morning sun. The old woman yelled "aram." Quiet. I could hear the boys shriek and the old woman's commands through the DetectEar Parabolic Microphone headset. With all the techno widgets, I felt like Luke Skywalker in a desert of dinosaurs.

The old woman went back to fiddling with the rope, every few seconds glancing below the wooden support beams, leaning on the rough-edged rocks. No one, it seemed, had missed the dog. During the late night, before we placed the listening devices, the dog yelped to warn of intruders. He had that mongrel third-world look, though taller than most and skinny enough to be a meal only for the starving. His milky eyes shone in the darkness and he growled as Thorsten's silenced .22 bullet went into his brain. Thorsten knew I wouldn't shoot a dog. A Taliban probably, but I drew the line at animals. He pulled the trigger and winked at me. There was no place to hide the carcass, so we dropped it down the well and scuffed the blood stains with our desert boots. Now, the only thing that marked our trail was the flies.

They might come in daylight if the meeting was urgent. It was more likely we would have to wait into the night, hunkered behind boulders the size of Humvees. We had the camo blankets over us, and even a sheep would start to nibble on our feet before he knew we were there. At least we had the hydration bottles and hoses so we could drink without movement in the afternoon heat. Pissing was a problem, but having my dick in the gravel was the least of my worries.

It was supposed to be a summit of local Taliban chieftains, certainly supporters of al-Qaeda if they were. They wouldn't come alone to this place. Not their style. It would be in teams of at least six, probably more. And the women better not be visible. Their duty was to be unseen. Any respectable Taliban man knew women were seducers and only distracted from Allah's work.

If intel was right, and we had to phone for the Predator Drones, the women wouldn't be whipped again, and the children would never kick another can in the dust. They'd be red blood smears on the brown rocks. But, I wasn't going to let that annihilation happen. Too many eyes would appear in my nightmares.

Our job was supposed to be simple — listen and report. With my smattering of Pashto, I was a thousand klicks ahead of anyone else with an Anglo face around this part of Tora Bora. If I heard the devil's name, Osama, come through my headset or picked up any hint of evil intent, it was time for the bandits to shoot their Hellfire missiles and make tomato soup spiced with clay. If it was more innocent, take a few snaps with the LIVAR 400 long-range surveillance camera, adding to the rows of mug shots pinned to the cork board at HQ or filling the Windows Vista picture files labeled Suspected al-Qaeda.

Tired. Not from the lack of real air or the times I woke in the middle of night thinking I was drowning — only to find out I was in my cot and it was just another attack of altitude sickness. Or from the ten-klick humps up and down the hardscrabble bleakness. It was the killing.

The RPGs didn't choose between women, children, and enemy. They just did their job, blowing body parts into the clear blue sky. The darkness didn't veil the last wide-eyed look of a target if he awoke before I put a round through his forehead. But his shock invaded my dreams. The visions always asked "why?" And I couldn't answer.

I was in this fucked-up place because of a belief I was resolving guilt issues. And a patriotic debt. And I was actually only feeling guiltier.

I was helping make sure the oil pipeline from Central Asia to the Arabian Sea was completed. Anyone getting in the way pissed off the petroleum lobby, Haliburton, and its subsidizer, the Pentagon, and all the politicians with oil greasing their veins. And the funding was helped by the world's largest suppliers of heroin, the Taliban. Tonight's op was just another reminder. If Osama's name came up, I was ordered to have the voices silenced with four hundred pounds of high explosives, not captured so the interrogators at the base could gather intel. I now feared no one wanted Osama found. He was the face splashed around the globe to justify any and all atrocities.

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Excerpted from Pashtun by Ron Lealos. Copyright © 2014 Ron Lealos. Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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